European Marketing Campaign of the year 2009

For the second year running our work for Aberdeen has been recognised for its effectiveness by Funds Europe. The judges felt the campaign captured perfectlythe spirit of the asset class with effectiveness measured through high market share and net inflows of over £600m.

During the unprecedented market volatility and risk aversion at the end of 2008, Aberdeen Asset Management expected a return of risk appetite from cash and Emerging Markets. Our brief was to help the sales and marketing team increase awareness of the funds' suitability in volatile markets by targeting private banks, life companies, platforms, wealth managers and the larger IFA networks.

The creative solution is inspired by Aberdeen's house rule to meet company management before they invest and to keep on meeting them afterwards.... to the extent that they won't invest if they don't like the company. It's designed to engage - we visualised our very own 'Man from Del Monte' travelling through the developing world on his scooter or his rickshaw...whatever it takes Aberdeen get there...

The scooter (which we bought on EBay!) became the campaign icon and provided us with a tongue-in-cheek opportunity to film the 'fund manager' preparing his briefcase for travel. We combined the film shoot with still photography of the scooter so we could keep costs to a minimum and produce all the elements we needed for a multi media campaign.

The scooter may not have made it to Brazil just yet (I think a fair amount of restarting the engine would be needed) but it travelled from the London office to road shows including the Funds Forum in Monaco. The campaign ran across 8 countries and in 5 languages.

"At launch, we did not anticipate how well our campaign would resonate with our buying base, given how quiet many of our competitors had been over the same period. We gained significant daily inflows into our UK and cross-border GEM funds, across many diverse client channels. GEM equities became our best selling product: we generated over £600m of net inflows across Europe. We're grateful for Abstracts' quick response to our brief Ð in the hectic run-up to Christmas when everyone else was starting to unwind they came up with the creative idea which was bang on brief, sourced all the props, the studio and their friendly crew to film for the online creative .."

Rob Sanders, Senior Marketing Manager,
Aberdeen Asset Management

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